Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

The story emphasizes that labor costs are not the primary issue here. There is the natural discussion of skill levels, and the sheer number of Chinese works coming online. But there simply is no way that Foxconn City could exist in the United States today. There is no way I can deny the massive quality of life improvements in China over the past generation. But, the flip side of this is that a way of life has now emerged organically in places like Shenzen which is rather reminiscent of late 19th and early 20th century dystopian visions of the industrial future.

Believe it or not I am probably mildly skeptical about the possibilities for the 21st century as a canvas for human flourishing. That is one reason I like to emphasize the positive, because it is important for me to not get caught up in my own bias. Over the last two human generations (50 years) mean world life expectancy has gone from ~53 to ~69. This is easy for me forget concretely because I come from a relatively long lived family. Though all were born in British India and died in Bangladesh my grandparents lived to ages of 75, 100, 80, and 80. My grandparent who died at the age of 75 still lived 25 years longer than life expectancy in Bangladesh in the year he died.

Today I see a headline in The New York Times, Majority of Chinese Now Live in Cities. For some reason I was prompted to look up the Wikipedia entry for Shenzhen, a city of 350,000 in 1982, which is now at 10 million. The image below of Shenzhen captures for me the poignant banality of the future present. One the one hand it is nothing special, a typical “world city” skyline. But there is also an aspect redolent of the soft focus depictions of the cities of the future in the children’s books I would read in the 1980s. The photo is proof of nothing. Rather, it is an illustration of fact.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Thomas Libby filmed rainbow agamas – a beautiful species with the no-frills scientific name of Agama agama – as they leapt from a horizontal platform onto a vertical wall. Before they jumped, they first had to vault onto a small platform. If the platform was covered in sandpaper, which provided a good grip, the agama could angle its body perfectly. In slow motion, it looks like an arrow, launching from platform to wall in a smooth arc (below, left)

If the platform was covered in a slippery piece of card, the agama lost its footing and it leapt at the wrong angle. It ought to have face-planted into the wall, but Libby found that it used its long, slender tail to correct itself (below, right). If its nose was pointing down, the agama could tilt it back up by swinging its tail upwards.

For the same reasons, long-jumpers swing their arms down at the end of their jumps to bring their legs up. Like everything else in the universe, they obey the law of “conservation of angular momentum”. In any isolated system (and an airborne long-jumper certainly counts), a rotation in one direction has to be counter-balanced by a rotation in the opposite direction. If the jumpers want to raise their legs up, they have to swing their arms down.

The same applies to a leaping lizard, which doesn’t have long arms, but does have a long tail. If you picture it the lizard leaping to the right, the rising tail has a clockwise momentum, and the trunk gets an equal anti-clockwise momentum. As per usual, the laws of physics fail to break.

Libby demonstrated the value of the tail by building a lovely agama-sized robot. It had four wheels and a long, aluminium ‘tail’, and it launched itself off a ramp like a ski-jumper. As the agama-bot jumped, its front wheels left the ramp before the rear ones, causing its nose to tilt downwards. If its tail was immobilised, its body kept on rotating in this way. If the robot was allowed to move its tail (whose angle was controlled by a gyroscope), it did exactly what the real agama did. It lifted the tail to angle its body upwards, correcting its tilted posture.

Some dinosaurs might have used the same trick. This isn’t a new idea. Back in 1969, John Ostrom suggested that Deinonychus – a sickle-clawed, larger relative of Velociraptor – would have used its tail as a stabiliser when it jumped. The tail was a stiff rod, but it was flexible at its base and could bend by 90 degrees. By moving it around, Deinonychus could have controlled the direction of its jump.

Ever since, drawings have depicted Deinonychus and its relatives as active, agile predators, leaping onto the backs of larger prey, often with tail pointing skywards. One of the raptors in Jurassic Park does exactly this. When it jumps from the balcony onto the T.rex skeleton, its tail angles up, just as leaping lizards do. The animators clearly got the physics right.

Libby tested this idea by creating a mathematical model to represent Velociraptor’s body, based on the data he gathered from the agama. The model showed that the dinosaur would have outperformed the lizard. A similar movement of its tail would have corrected the angle of its body by a greater degree. To rotate its body by 45 degrees, the agama would need to rotate its tail through around 60 degrees, but Velociraptor could have managed with around 30.

Libby writes that small meat-eating dinosaurs like Velociraptor “might have been capable of aerial acrobatics beyond even those displayed by present-day [tree-living] lizards.”

Libby works with Bob Full lab at University of California Berkeley, who has spent years studying the movements of animals, often using delightful robots. This isn’t the first time the group has looked at lizards either. A few years back, they showed that geckos climb walls by exploiting the very forces that bind molecules together. In 2008, they showed that geckos can use their tails as braces to stop themselves from falling, or as rudders to manoeuvre through the air. They even used their discoveries to build a wall-crawling gecko-bot.

Reference: Libby, Moore, Evan, Li, Cohen, Jusufi & Full. 2011. Tail-assisted pitch control in lizards, robots and dinosaurs. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature10710

More on jumping animals:

• Leaproach leaps, is roach
• Why do flying lemurs glide?
• Ancient Greek athletes did it gibbon-style
• Belly-flopping frogs
• Inner ear size can predict a mammal’s agility
• Geckos use their tails to stop falls and manoeuvre in the air

Update: OK, never mind about the comparison. I suspect that the bounce for “Kindle” is due to Kindle Fire.

But there are interesting international differences.

United States:

United Kingdom:

France:

Germany:

Italy:

Russia:

India:

Brazil:

Here’s Facebook vs. Orkut in Brazil:

So of course I checked out Google Trends:

Even StumbleUpon has now surpassed Digg in search queries. Was Digg the MySpace to reddit’s Facebook? And of course Slashdot keeps going…. (Slashdot is so well established that I doubt many people are “searching” for it, so these trends probably underestimate its reach and influence).